The Deadites are not done with us yet.
After the wonderfully nasty success of Evil Dead Rise, the franchise is crawling back out of the cellar with another standalone entry with Evil Dead Burn, the latest big screen nightmare from the world of the Necronomicon. If there is one thing this series has taught us over the years, it is that nobody should ever read from a creepy old book bound in human skin. Honestly, how many times do people need telling?
Evil Dead Burn comes from director Sébastien Vaniček, the filmmaker behind the skin-crawling spider horror Infested, which immediately makes this one feel like a good fit for a franchise built on panic, possession and people having the worst night of their lives. The film continues the new chapter of Evil Dead on the big screen, following the brutal, blood-soaked success of Evil Dead Rise, which proved there is still a lot of life, and death, left in Sam Raimi’s legendary horror creation.
The Evil Dead series has always had a brilliantly strange history. It started in 1981 as a scrappy cabin-in-the-woods shocker, made by Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Rob Tapert, then somehow grew into one of horror’s most beloved franchises. Across the original trilogy, Fede Álvarez’s brutal 2013 standalone sequel, Ash vs Evil Dead (robbed of a final season) and Evil Dead Rise, it has managed to be scary, disgusting, funny, inventive and completely unhinged, often all at the same time. As a bonus for horror fans, Evil Dead Burn is not the end of the road. The next movie, Evil Dead Wrath, has already been shot, with Francis Galluppi, director of The Last Stop in Yuma County, writing and directing. Raimi returns alongside fellow producer Rob Tapert, with the cast featuring Charlotte Hope, Jessica McNamee, Zach Gilford, Josh Helman and Ella Newton. Plot details are still being kept quiet, which feels about right for a franchise where discovering too much usually ends with someone losing a limb, but we’ll see a trailer long before its current April 7, 2028 release date.
Taking the standalone approach for the last 3 (4 including Wrath) movies has really worked for the franchise, there’s no fear of a remake, no concern that somebody else will wield the boomstick, and it lets each film be its own insanely violent, frequently disturbing, and always gory thing. Other long running horror franchises could learn a lot from the Evil Dead. They should write a book, second thoughts they should 100% not write a book as it will likely be made of human skin, and bad things will happen if anybody reads about loud from it.
Evil Dead Burn is released by Studiocanal, with a digital release on August 24 followed by DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD on October 12.
